2025 was a bit insane, so we’re letting 2024’s article go by the wayside.

Great blog-posts / articles read

Why your outdoorsy friend suddenly has a gummy bear power bank , and the notable followup that got it taken off of Amazon (but of course Amazon hasn’t taken down anay of the less meme-able items that were simultaneously foudn to have safety issues)

Most viewed blog posts by me

Our wedding website!

Favorite non-technical books read

The entire Steerswoman series by Rosemary Kirstein blew me away. I found it from a random recomendation online and I’m glad I went into it without knowing a whole lot. I also read the recently self-published versions, the original covers are AWFUL and take away from the sense of discovery you get reading the books. To a great extent, these are stories about the scientific method and learning to understand your world- knowing as little as possible before reading helps you take that same journey as the main characters.

The Devils by Joe Abercrombie

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers

Some of my 2024 favorite books:

Robin Hobb’s Farseer trilogy

Witness For the Dead by Katherine Addison

The Murderbot series by Martha Wells (I avoided these for a long time because I thought the name was cringy. I’m glad I got over my hangups because they’re very fun stories) *

Number of books read

25

Number of blog posts written

0 finished and published, although I started many :) I think for 2026 I’ll try to focus less on perfection, more on just getting things done. I guess that’s the LLM approach.

Miles ridden on my bike

494. Honestly pretty good considering what a busy year it was. A smidge under half of these were commuting miles.

Side note: I also got an ebike near the end of the year, which I don’t track in Strava

I calculated this number using the same methodology as previous years: scrolling through the Strava activity pages, filtering to bike rides, and running this script one page at a time

Array.from(document.getElementsByClassName('training-activity-row'))
  .filter(e =>
    e.getElementsByClassName('col-date')[0].innerHTML.endsWith('2025'))
  .map(e =>
    parseFloat(e.getElementsByClassName('col-dist')[0].textContent))
  .reduce((sum, dist) => sum + dist)

Miles driven in my car

6379¹. I’m catching up to the national average!

Miles driven in other people’s cars

250

Favorite musicians discovered

Skinshape

Viagra Boys

Glorb

Favorite films/shows

I still have some catching up to do on a lot of the top movies. At some point I’ll watch One Battle After Another and Sinners!

However I did enjoy:

The Naked Gun legacy sequel

KPop Demon Hunters

Favorite games discovered

Rimworld: Scratches the same itch as Dwarf Fortress, with (slightly) less complexity.

Schedule I: A nice skinner box. Do actions, upgrade your character and buildings.

Baldur’s Gate 3: I’m a sucker for a good top down turn based RPG, and this is as good as it gets.

Factorio: The expansion came out!

Favorite programming languages (or related) I hacked on/with

I’m in love with jj for version control. It’s compatible with git but a huge advancement. Less work dealing with conflicts, simple rebasing, easier to reason about what commands are doing.

Still haven’t read…

The copy of Gödel, Escher, Bach I’ve had for years.

Life-changing technology “discovered”

Vibe coding (sorry)

DIY solar. It’s pretty intriguing although not super viable with my current living situation.

Favorite purchase

2025 was an expensive year but just about everything was worth it. My favorite purcahse would probably be the wedding, although the honeymoon is a great runner-up.

Some less exciting things but still worthy things to highlight:

• Wu Tang concert tickets. Was awesome to see their show at the Staples Center

• Charity plane ride. Bid a couple hundred bucks for a ride in a Cessna on a whim, and it was an incredible experience. Beats Microsoft Flight Simulator!

• Wurkkos HD10 headlamp/flashlight: You don’t realize how handy a headlamp is until you have one. Wanna go for a walk while holding stuff at night? Headlamp! Wanna build furniture after sunset but worried about losing screws or parts in your living room’s uneven light? Headlamp! Biking home in the dark? Headlamp (I actually use mine as an extra taillight). This light uses an open source firmware called “Anduril” which is ridiculously complicated but very powerful. There’s at least a dozen different operations you can do based on different patterns of short vs long presses on the flashlight power button. Here’s the flowchart how how to use a standard Anduril light:

But don’t worry, there’s a “simple” mode too!

Shoutout to containerfan for creating these diagrams and sharing on Github. I also found Ivan’s manual handy.

Even when you’re following the flowchart, Anduril isn’t exactly user friendly. It’s very easy to lose track of the light’s state while moving between different modes and configuration menus. I wish there was say a Bluetooth app you could use for setting configuration, then the button pushes could be solely for flashlight actions.

State of plans from 2020 2021 2022 2023 2024 2025

N/A

Plans for 2026

Multiple blog posts

Stay up to date with the rapidly shifting AI landscape

Keep biking

Maybe think about doing RAGBRAI in 2027?!?

Create an app that uses LLMs to filter out spammy app notifications